After the two large Skylanders projects had been completed the small team of staffers left at Panda Panther turned to creating some new showreel pieces for the company reel. They’d recently bought a motion control camera rig to shoot stop-motion elements. We moved it from one New York basement to another and took several days of professional training from a British master of motion control to learn all it’s tricks. The desire was to find a good way to blend live, modeled and stop motion elements into CG and 2D animated elements. It was something I’d wanted to have a go at for some time and a good excuse to experiment. The idea was to create an intro and outro for the company reel. The visual elements came purely from the the creators and owners of the company but within that brief we experimented with how to make something that gelled well between all the unique elements. A unique challenge was trying to make a camera move in Maya, that would not make the real world camera collide into the walls or ceiling. The basement roof was covered in pipes and there were pillars to avoid. This is a very […]

I had the pleasure of going to New York to work on the pre-rendered game cinematics for the new Skylanders Giants for all console platforms including some unique stereoscopic sequences for the 3DS. The games are currently being splashed all over the Disney channels ready for the Christmas season. I’ve written up a little about my experiences working on both sets of sequences here: Skylanders Giants Skylanders Giants 3DS